Procrastination test 

Finally the book have a small test to find out whether you are having a high risk of procrastination or more resilience towards it. Score yourself from 1 to 10 on the following :

  1. Conscientiousness: whether you are responsible, competence, efficient, follow though 
  2. Emotional instable: means you are easily being influence by things surround you 
  3. Impulsiveness :anxiety, tense, depression, shy, and moody, usually act before thinking 
  4. Self advocacy : you have a clear desire 
  5. Self esteem : having self worth 
  6. Socially prescribe perfectionism

If you sum up the procrastination risk score (item 2, 3 and 6) tog can compare them against your resilience scores (item 1, 4 and 5) you  will have some guidance on where you are leaning towards and be able to adjust to combat procrastination.

A few steps to combat Procrastination 

Further more the “Solving Procrastination puzzle” book suggest the following steps :

  1. Will power strengthening : you will need to control yourself 
  2. Sleep/rest will : typical adult will need approximately 8 hours sleep, lacking sleep will lower you will power to start on anything because you will feel tired
  3. Strategy to move the will power to start things earlier rather than later 
  4. Positive boost of emotion : from time to time we need some nudge, some sort of encouragement 
  5. Implementation intention plan: If you don’t have a plan you plan to fail
  6. Self regulations : blood glucose is needed for body to regulate, when you are feeling a bit low, this is necessary 
  7. Social interaction needs more self regulation 
  8. Self regulation depends on motivation 

How to get things done 

The “Solving procrastination puzzle” book also highlight some steps you can use to try to combat procrastination.

  1. Just get started : an example to this is if you are a college student and have a homework after your math class, don’t wait until just before it is due to try complete the task, but rather start to do or right after the class of that night on the same day where tog had sit in the class. This will ensure that your mind is still fresh with the lesson about that particular math problem.
  2. Write task and ask sub task: You cannot possibly run before trying to crawl. So if you can’t think of a solution to the problem, try to break it down into much smaller task. As you go along solving each of the smaller task, eventually you will figure out more tasks and this will all points to the direction to solving the bigger problem 

Solving Procrastination Puzzle

I just completed listening to “Solving Procrastination puzzle” audio book. It is quite an interesting one. We as a human being from time to time procrastinate. What the book is trying to explain is why this is happening, and ultimately if we know the why, we can try to solve it and thus getting more things done.

The book started with defining the difference between delay and procrastination. It defined procrastination as needless or voluntary delay. It also talk about how people with lower emotional intelligence will have bigger procrastination. Some people procrastinate to avoid negative emotions related to the task, in this way they will make themselves feel good by procrastinating. This is also called strategic procrastination, we make ourselves feel good by trying and finishing things last minute.